Ryan Lott is a classically-trained musician and composer who has written for films, television ads, and dance companies in New York. But since his stunning 2008 debut as Son Lux, At War With Walls & Mazes, Lott has been making lush and experimental songs that blend new classical, rock, electronic music in fascinating and ambitious ways.
Continue reading Son Lux: A Vivid And Arresting Musical World
Bassist Ben Allison is one of jazz’s best “glue guys,” a versatile musician’s musician whose presence in the liner notes enlivens practically anyone’s recording. But it’s as a composer and bandleader where his idiosyncratic musicianship truly shines. Allison has been banging around a good while at this point, with a resume that includes numerous awards (seven SESAC Performance Awards) and notable citations in places like DownBeat Magazine‘s Readers and Critic’s poll. (He even composed the theme for WNYC’s program On The Media.)
Continue reading Ben Allison Turns To The Jazz Cosmos With ‘D.A.V.E.’
There’s plenty to unpack in the wry, confessional lyrics of the Speedy Ortiz — the solo-moniker-turned rock band of singer and guitarist Sadie Dupuis. With lines like “Spent the summer on crutches and everybody teased / except for this one friend I almost forgot” (“No Below”), Dupuis lets us in, revealing her distinctively sharp point of view — equal parts hilariously self-deprecating and brutally honest.
Continue reading Speedy Ortiz: Hilariously Self-Deprecating And Brutally Honest
To call Jenny Hval a multidisciplinary artist is something of an understatement. The Oslo, Norway-based musician is also a conceptual artist, poet, critic — she wrote her master’s thesis about Kate Bush — and writer with two published books — one a novel, Prelebryggeriet (The Pearl House). But as musician, Hval is one of the most fascinating young artists out there.
Her latest album, Innocence Is Kinky, is a musically bold, experimental collection of songs equally beautiful and abrasive. Produced by longtime PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish, Hval’s songs fall somewhere between Kate Bush’s delicate art pop and PJ Harvey’s primal rock. And on songs like “Mephisto In The Water” and “I Called,” she blends calming ambient sounds and bursts of harsh noise. Floating above all those textures is Hval’s ethereal voice, which seamlessly transitions between icy singing to hushed whisper-singing to spoken word passages.
Lyrically, Hval is even more provocative: The subject matter on Innocence Is Kinky — which began as an experimental sound and light installation — explores gender roles and sexuality (“Amphibious, Androgynous”), high and low culture (“Innocence Is Kinky”), and politics (“Oslo Oedipus”) with direct and graphic frankness.
The result is a raw and challenging record full of blunt, but interesting stream-of-conscious ideas.
Beck hasn’t put out a new record since 2008’s Modern Guilt. And sure, that’s a long wait for fans eager for new music, but the ever-inventive songwriter has been far from dormant: From his diverse production work and Record Club video series, to last year’s sheet music album, Song Reader, Beck’s remained as creative and productive as ever.
And this summer, he resurfaced in a big way, playing a run of acoustic shows in New York and at the Newport Folk Festival and (finally!) dropping a few new singles on his own record label, Fonograf. Now, Beck has released his third new single, “Gimme.”
With “Gimme,” Beck completes a trilogy of stand-alone songs that, when heard all together, seem tonally and musically linked.
In June, there’s was wobbly and chopped electronic beats of “Defriended”
And, in July, the sparkling, dreamy pop of “I Won’t Be Long.”
And now there’s “Gimme,” a short percussive-driven track featuring heavily-filtered, robotic-sounding vocals and essentially indecipherable except the titular words “gimme.” And with plenty of sonic noises filling out the corners of the mix the weirdest one he’s put out.
None of these tracks will appear on Beck’s forthcoming, so far unannounced full-length album (and possibly two albums) due sometime before the end of the year. And while these three songs may — or may not — serve as an indication of what’s to come, with a musician like Beck, it’s always fun following him no matter what direction turns.
Amid the rumble of traffic, crowded streets, and general persistent din of big city life, it can be challenging to find a moment of calm in New York. So it seemed like a peculiar choice when the enigmatic singer-songwriter Bill Callahan said he was interested in playing in a community garden for a Field Recording video WNYC’s Soundcheck co-produced with NPR Music. You could easily envision Callahan’s plaintive music and deep, detached voice getting lost in that noisy clutter.
But in fact, the lush 6th & B Community Garden in the East Village was just the spot for Callahan’s intimate and eerily transfixing performance. Recording previously as Smog, and now simply under his own name, Callahan writes dark, frequently anguished songs inflected with a bleak sense of doom. And yet, there’s actually a surprisingly warm, pastoral quality to his words, and a comforting voice in his sly delivery.
Surrounded by a rich canopy of greenery, ornamented flower beds, and even a small pond full of turtles, Callahan quietly finger-picked “Small Plane,” a song from his new record Dream River (out Sept. 17). And while sounds from just outside the garden’s tall gates trickled in, all those distractions of the city just outside the gates melted away.
There’s no denying there’s a spiritual quality to the music of Anna von Hausswolff. Much of this can be attributed to the fact that the Swedish singer and musician plays the pipe organ, an instrument that fills cavernous church sanctuaries and holy spaces with rich layers of sound. But it’s also her songs on this year’s superb record Ceremony, that take on an otherworldly transcendence mixing moody orchestrations with engrossing, almost poppy melodies.
So when Soundcheck had the opportunity to film von Hausswolff in New York City, as a co-production with NPR Music’s Field Recordings series it was only natural to seek out a pipe organ in a church that could accommodate. Filmed and recorded inside the spacious and regal Christ Church — a United Methodist church on Park Avenue — von Hausswolff’s rendition of “Funeral For My Future Children” is outright stunning.
Amidst the ornate decorations and glowing candles, the stained glass windows, and simply the sound of the of organ as it swelled and enveloped the entire room, von Hausswolff’s performance showcased the nuanced beauty of her voice and the epic power of the instrument.
So many bands have tended to pull from the “indie rock” part of the 1980s — the edgy rock and punk and hardcore bands that embody the DIY ethos, and all that. But lately we’re starting to get bands wistful for the other half of that decade, the side that punk was rebelling against: the commercialized, MTV-ready, Reagan-ized pop music that dominated the radio charts. Don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of this music, if not back then when I was too little, then now as I’ve come to discover that music with new ears. In fact, just this year groups like CHVRCHES and HAIM have nailed that sound, but modernize it with buoyant and inventive electronics and killer hooks that demonstrate tightly-wound songcraft behind the polish.
Pure Bathing Culture has touches of that sound too, but with something closer to a glittery New Wave-meets-New Age tone: the sparkly chimes, the silky smooth synth flourishes, and breathy vocals, just a little too airy to deliver much emotion beyond broken-hearted.
Pure Bathing Culture writes the kind of winsome, crystalline pop songs steeped in a hazy past remembered only through hissy VHS home movies that have been played a few too many times. With its debut album Moon Tides, the Portland, Ore. duo — Sarah Versprille and Daniel Hindman, formerly of Vetiver — worked with producer extraordinaire Richard Swift to evoke a sound capturing the sun-dappled 1970’s cuddle rock, ’80s radio pop, and the alluring and wobbly melodies of artists like Kate Bush or Cocteau Twins.
Moon Tides is a record that filters those pristine, high-end influences through lo-fi production sounds: thrift shop drum machines, reverb-drenched guitar arpeggios and shimmering keyboards that seem to dissipate into the ether. Whether by calculated choice, or simply a by-product of not having the kind of money to spend to fully achieve the sheen of bands of that era (probably the latter), Pure Bathing Culture and Swift’s production actually grounds these songs with more tasteful application of the genre tropes, and side-step sounding as syrupy.
Still, with heart-aching three-minute gems like “Pendulum” and “Only Lonely Lovers,” Pure Bathing Culture proves adept at rendering those nostalgic moods into songs both timeless and earnest.
I’ve been a a fan and admirer of TV On The Radio since the one-two punch masterpieces, 2004’s Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes and 2006’s Return To Cookie Mountain. At the time, songs like “I Was A Lover” and “Province” were truly mind-boggling, resetting my expectation for what “indie rock” should and could sound like. Melding so many genres effortlessly, TV On The Radio has long been a band of great ambition and always sounded genuinely musically curious.
However, since those two albums I sorta tuned out a bit. I found Dear Science a disappointing, over-produced mess that lost the songs amid the fussy production. And I’m not sure I spent much time with 2011’s Nine Types Of Light — a record that suddenly took on far darker meaning with the loss of longtime member Gerard Smith, who died from lung cancer just after the release.
TV On The Radio has been relatively dormant since that last album, but now the Brooklyn-based band has begun to show signs of activity again, teasing out tidbits about its follow-up. There’s very little known at this point about what it’s called or when it’ll drop, we’re now starting to get something of a sense for what it could sound like. Some weeks back TV On The Radio previewed the song “Mercy,” an edgy basher full of buzzed-out guitars and strobing synths.
Today NPR Music and various public radio entities like WNYC’s Soundcheck (for whom I work) premiered a second taste with another new track, the subdued, yet beautifully soulful “Million Miles.”
Meanwhile, the song’s music video also debuted, as part of a series of six videos made by MySpace and Sitek’s Federal Prism label. This one is directed by Kyp Malone with Natalia Leite.
Compared to “Mercy,” or a lot of TV On The Radio’s back catalog for that matter, “Million Miles” is deceptively simple: With soaring falsetto and the chiming arpeggios of a Fender Rhodes keyboard, the song recalls the R&B jams on 2006’s Return To Cookie Mountain, more than say, the aggressive live wire distortion and big beats of Dear Science.
And yet, as the chorus swells with Dave Sitek’s trademark dense thickets of sound, “Million Miles” proves undeniably cathartic as Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone’s powerful vocals sing “Don’t you let love break your heart / Give it all your power.”
Whether playing sneering, throat-slitting punk rockers or crafting cavernous experiments piled high with noise hugging the periphery — it’s amazing that after all these years TV On The Radio remains a group with such uncompromising artistic vision. This song is a gorgeous reminder of why I fell in love with the group in the first place. Can’t wait to hear more.
It was early evening at South By Southwest in 2011, and my ears were already blasted out from a few days of the noisy madness of Austin’s Sixth Street. Exhausted, and feeling a little daunted about what music to seek out the rest of that night, I wandered into Austin’s gorgeous Central Presbyterian Church to catch my breath with the music of Julianna Barwick. As I sat in the church pews (with my pal, NPR Music’s Stephen Thompson), I could feel the weight lifting.
The next day, I was lucky enough to have chance to meet Barwick for a video shoot with NPR Music at the famed Driskill Hotel and see her setup up close and watch her perform my favorite song “Bob In Your Gait.”
I was familiar, if not an expert on Barwick’s music before. After that SXSW, I was a fan.
To listen to the hypnotic choral voices of Julianna Barwick is to be swept away, transported to a musical world out of time. Her songs are lush, yet minimally constructed, parsing out fragments of looped word-less vocal phrases and spare instrumentation and layering them into church-filling meditations.
With her previous records, like 2011’s superb (and perfectly titled) The Magic Place, Barwick assembled her music by singing into a single microphone through some effects and a loop pedal into a laptop, while sitting cross-legged on her bed alone in her Brooklyn bedroom “studio.” For music that feels intended for ancient crumbling cathedrals, it seems hi-tech. Yet for most modern electronic music, however, that domestic intimacy is decidedly lo-fi.
For Nepenthe, her forthcoming record (out Aug. 20), Barwick both expands her musical worldview, and collaborates with others, turning to Icelandic musician Alex Somers (of Sigur Rós, Jónsi) to record this latest collection of moody and experimental tapestries amid Iceland’s majestic landscapes. The album also brings in collaborations with string ensemble Amiina, Múm guitarist Róbert Sturla Reynisson, and a choir of teenage girls to fill out the sound in a new way.
Like its predecessors, Nepenthe artfully mixes Barwick’s alluring voice — think Gregorian chant crossed with Enya, but in a good way — with swooning electronics, all fluttering and swelling in the shadows. Yet, with the influence of Somers — and, no doubt, the setting itself — songs like “Offing” or “Forever,” with all those sounds swirling in the ether, take on new life, becoming even more wonderfully cathartic and grand. And in “One Half,” Barwick sings distinct, if still elusive lyrics for the first time.
Nepenthe is not an immediate album and it won’t actively grab you right away — but that’s not really the point: Barwick’s music is so subtle, so delicate, so outright pretty, that you just have to let it linger in the room like a halo of smoke slowly unfurling.
Even now, a few years later, Julianna Barwick’s immersive and near-spiritual set at SXSW is one of my favorite things I’ve seen at the festival, so much so that I’ve almost been reluctant to see her again in concert, if only because that setting was so perfect, I can’t fathom how anything could rise to that. Next week, Barwick will be performing her amazing new record in New York, in a church. I hope to be there so I can close my eyes, lean back, and let this elusive and stunning music take me away again.
UPDATE: Today on WNYC’s Soundcheck, Julianna Barwick dropped by the studio to play three songs from the new record. Plus, see some photos I shot as well.